For the determination of tooth colors, color keys have been employed for a long time that are to make it possible to achieve a best possible match or approximation to the neighboring teeth when selecting a color of a tooth to be restored in order to be capable of giving the restoration a natural appearance.
A dental color key of this kind is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,589.
In recent times, an electronic color determination has been carried out, as it is apparent for example from US 2009/0033927 A1.
Within a tooth, the color shade typically changes, and in particular the translucency.
In order to exclude human influences during the assessment, it has also been proposed to detect an existing tooth color with the aid of a dental camera and to electronically select the suitable tooth color such as A1, A2, A3 etc. For a solution of this kind, however, elaborate calibration steps have to be conducted, and an electronic color detection device rather comes into consideration in larger dental offices.
Electronic color detection, however, surprisingly often does not produce the optimal results as a dental camera for example detects the translucency only inadequately. In order to achieve some improvement, in some cases an additional matching with a commercial color key is carried out that basically involves extra effort.
Further, it has already been proposed to automatically conduct an image detection or capture of an existing picture taken by a dental camera. In order to compensate for the color errors, it has also been proposed to conduct a color transformation, as a result of which it has been found that this solution despite the effort thereby incurred unfortunately does not achieve improved results.